I have often thought and stated that these sites might be cheating us. It was a risk I took and continue to take to play. However, I always felt one day it would come out. I envisioned a shrouded figure on 60 minutes talking (voice distorted) about the systematic fleecing of millions, and how incredibly easy it was/is. I can hear his garbled voice saying, "they just sent us millions of dollars, it poured in everyday, when it was gone, they sent us more, they trusted us. Why? I don't know. There was/is no oversight and no way to stop us, it was more than we could resist, so we took it, we took a lot of it."

I have also often been amazed by how players defend(ed) the sites like they were their own children. How they called anyone who doubted a site's integrity all kinds of horrible names.

Well now it's out. They cheat. I for one am not surprised in the least. They (online gaming sites) have access to millions of our dollars and there is not one damn thing stopping them from taking whatever they want whenever they want.

The tin foil hat haters always said, "they are making millions, why would they rig it?"

I always said in response, "there's one thing people with millions want, more millions!" And, they want it sooner rather than later.

The AP situation appears to be an employee of AP, or an indsider, who, with access to a 'master account,' used his position to steal from the users on the site. It has not been determined if he had accomplices, or how many their might be.

This does not appear to be any hack or software comprimise. It is an insider who is comitting a crime, which I am sure that the site did not approve.

Please know the facts before you trumpet your tin foil hat brothers and call them to arms.

I refuse to dust off my tin foil hat. I think that one rouge employee or contractor does not necessarily mean the whole company is robbing you. I think the way Absolute has/is handling this is very bad for their image and will cause them a lot of grief. They need to bite the bullet and accept responsibility for their lax programming security, compensate those who were harmed financially, close the backdoor, and get on with business. The longer it takes them to do this, the more damage is done to their credibility.

J&amp;J lost millions recalling every bottle of Tylenol that was poisoned by some POS. They didn't taint it, but it was their responsibility to handle the aftermath and they did so immediately. Now, they're one of the most respected brands in the world.

AP could of had their "Tylenol moment", but they blew it. If they embraced the responsibility to maintain a fair gaming standard by coming clean and saying "something was fucked up, but we're on it" right away, we wouldn't have 90% of these posts. In the absence of facts, speculation dominates.

Sorry. But there is a guy that walks around in my neighborhood with a "THE WORLD IS GOING TO END TOMORROW" sign. One day the world will end. I guess when that day comes, this guy can claim, "See, I was right"!!

So to all the "online poker is rigged!!!" crowd, GTFO.

This is a case of a crooked insider scamming players out of a lot of money. The problem is NOT that there was a crooked insider which somehow "proves" online poker is rigged.

There are crooked insiders at my bank. My insurance company. At the resturant where I use my credit card. There are crooked people everywhere, working 24/7, trying to scam somebody.

What sets apart my bank or other businesses apart from the retarded monkeys at Absolute are a couple of things. Most businesses have procedures, and audits, and balances, and checkpoints, etc. to quickly catch a crooked insider. I think it is apparent that Absolute's "security" would have never detected this in a million years. I don't think they are even fully convinced that chip dumping took place.

I wonder how at AP that the bad beat jackpot winner is always a player with almost no mtt history?? These bad beat jackpots are huge amounts of money that go to seemingly "new" players everytime it hits. very suspicious to me!!!

It doesn't take a tin foil hat to know this is bad overall for the online poker industry, esp. in the U.S. I effing hate it but you know it's true. The problem is if they shut us down here, how will I manage a 2-hour commute to St. Louis every night to get my fix?

Not sure how serious the OP is, but yes, this does give the "tin foil" community a new tool in their arguments. Anything that smells of conspiracy, or allows someone to say "I told you so" will only give them bigger boners. So take those big ole conspiracy boners and stick em in your light socket.

You must not have a firm understanding of how Server/client relations work. You would need to be able to log into the server side of the application in order to see the hole cards.

You could sit and try to argue that some rogue hackers got a hold of the source code and were able to write their own client software that allowed them &quot;root&quot; access to the AP server in order to see the hole cards.

You could also argue that aliens are landing in the US daily and aducting people from trailer parks for exaimations.

I would tend to disagree with you on the first, and I would tend to disagree with the 2nd hypothetical as well.

I like how you don't want to believe this was an inside job because we aren't 100% sure and yet with no evidence you assume that people are hacking every site. Nice to know that you use different standards of proof as needed to support your arguments.

yeah, absolute thought that in addition to the millions they make from rakes and entry fees, and apparently well-hidden cheating, they'd suddenly take a shot at getting $30K in a tourney through a superuser account, and then send all the evidence to the person who lost heads up.

Every energy company probably has atleast one employee who is less than ethical. Every baseball team has had or will have one player who has/will use performance enhancing drugs. I would also say it is safe to say that there will one day be another ref. in prof. sports who is involved in illegal gambling. Every piece of an organization stands to make up the whole.

Obviously true but that is not the spirit of the post that my post was responding to. Obviously there are going to be unethical people that work for Pokerstars, Bodog, etc., just like there are unethical people that work for the government (the same one we want to do the regulating), work at your kids' schools or work in police departments. It doesn't mean that we stop trusting those organizations as a whole, well ok, maybe the government...

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